Sano di Pietro, The Adoration of the Magi

James Jackson Jarves (1818–1888), Florence, by 1859

The support of the main panel, of a horizontal wood grain, has been thinned to a depth of 2.6 centimeters, waxed, and cradled. The panel has been trimmed by an indeterminate amount at the top and bottom, where engaged frame moldings have been lost, but truncated only minimally at either side. A barb, with remnants of gilding from this frame, is preserved along the top and both sides of the painted composition but is absent along the bottom. Splits at either end of the panel, 14 centimeters from the top on the left side and 16 centimeters from the top on the right, do not significantly interrupt the paint surface, whereas several knots and insect damage along the resinous whorls in the wood grain have provoked extensive flaking: nearly the entire lower third of the composition has been lost, and the remnants of gesso or color that might have remained there were scraped down to the surface of the wood during a particularly harsh cleaning in 1971. Numerous small flaking losses are scattered through the upper portion of the composition, but the paint surface that survives is generally free of abrasion and should be described as in excellent state. The gold of all the haloes is rubbed.

The left pilaster base (see Three Kneeling Confraternity Members) is a single panel of a vertical wood grain, 2.8 centimeters thick, with a 7-millimeter addition of old wood applied at the bottom. Both lateral edges were scraped to the wood during the 1971 cleaning by Andrew Petryn. The gold ground is rubbed to the bolus layer, but the paint surface is well preserved. The right pilaster base (see Three Kneeling Confraternity Members) is a single panel of a vertical wood grain, 2.9 centimeters thick. The left lateral edge retains its original gilt surface; the right lateral edge is covered with polished gesso but has lost any surface that may have covered this. The gold ground is scratched and worn on the right, but the paint surface is extremely well preserved. A large nail that secured the pilaster base to the main panel of the predella has been exposed on the right edge.

Unusual both for containing a single narrative subject stretched the full length of an altarpiece predella and for not having been cut into smaller fragments when it was dismantled from its original structure (fig. 1), this panel portrays various episodes in the story of the Adoration of the Magi, spread across a hilly landscape reminiscent of the Crete Senesi southeast of Siena. In the background at the far left, the three Magi point upward to a vision of the Star of Bethlehem in the sky, which is painted confusingly close to a haloed head appearing above the profile of a hill: the hindmost Magus beginning his journey, which continues with his two companions and their retinue filing through the landscape toward the right. The horsemen, their retainers, and their servants are seen again in a vignette in the middle ground at the right; these preliminary scenes are punctuated by a genre detail of a huntsman with dogs, standing in front of the hills behind which the train of the Magi processes. In the center of the composition, the Magi arrive at their destination. The Virgin is seated on a saddle placed on the ground before the manger, which fills a cave opening behind her. The Star of Bethlehem hovers above her head. She and the Christ Child on her lap regard the kneeling kings before them to the left, while Saint Joseph stands reverently behind them at the right. Singularly among all of Sano di Pietro’s versions of the Nativity or Adoration of the Magi, Saint Joseph is bearded and elderly but not bald. At the far left and right of the predella, painted on separate, vertically grained blocks affixed to the horizontal panel support, are two groups of three confraternity members clad in white and kneeling on a pink pavement, adoring the holy scene unfolding between them (see Sano di Pietro, Three Kneeling Confraternity Members; and Sano di Pietro, Three Kneeling Confraternity Members). Each group includes two fully hooded members behind one member whose cowl is thrown back: a younger man on the right and a bearded and balding older man on the left. The two unhooded figures each hold a large wooden cross with nails driven into the ends of its transverse arms. Both end blocks, which served as bases beneath the framing pilasters of the altarpiece from which this predella comes, have gilt backgrounds with punched margins running the full height of the panel at either side and across the top.¹

This important panel essentially disappeared from the literature of Sienese fifteenth-century painting after its drastic cleaning in 1971 and the absurd decision to leave it in its current dilapidated state, with the surface of the panel support exposed following the unwarranted removal of original layers of linen and gesso. Notwithstanding the claim that the cleaning revealed Sano’s authorship, which “could be surmised only a little earlier because of the heavy overpainting,”² there has never, since its first publication by James Jackson Jarves in 1860,³ been any doubt of the attribution to Sano, and no other artist’s name has ever been associated with this painting. F. Mason Perkins was particularly taken with the landscape background, writing of the “delizioso paesaggio, la quale è, per gaiezza e purità di colore, nitidezza di esecuzione e poesia di sentimento, una delle cose più squisite, non solamente dell’arte di Sano, ma di tutto il Quattrocento senese” (delicious landscape, which for the gaiety and purity of its color, the refinement of its execution, and the poetry of its sentiment, is one of the most exquisite efforts not only of Sano but of the entire Sienese quattrocento).⁴ Few writers have concerned themselves with dating the work. Raimond van Marle, surprisingly, compared it to Sano’s late manner,⁵ and Émile Gaillard, with greater justification, cited the Saint Jerome predella in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (fig. 2)—now known to be part of an altarpiece dated 1444—as a parallel for the treatment of the distant city views in the landscape.⁶ Charles Seymour, Jr., first dated the predella ca. 1450, without mentioning any comparatives that led him to this conclusion, and later suggested that it might have been painted in the 1440s.⁷ It is, in fact, a distinguished work probably of the early 1450s, when Sano’s interest in landscape, in details of costume, and in variety of figural attitudes remained in full evidence, but clearly later than the lively narratives of the Saint Jerome predella in the Louvre or the Saint Bartholomew predella of 1447 in Siena (fig. 3). It most closely approaches the figure types and narrative structure of the Saint Blaise predella (fig. 4) beneath the Scrofiano altarpiece of 1449, although it is probably slightly later than that transitional work.

Seymour claimed that the kneeling confraternity members in the pilaster bases at either side of the Adoration were “members of the Bianchi, a brotherhood which drew its name from the white robes and cowls worn by its adherents,” again without mentioning his source.⁸ Osvald Sirén said of these donor portraits only that “they seem to be members of a ‘Confraternità di Santa Croce,’ a brotherhood existing in most Italian cities of that time.”⁹ In Siena, the white robes and cowls and the emblem of the Cross were distinctive insignia of the Compagnia di Santa Maria sotto le Volte, also known as the Confraternità dei disciplinati di Maria Santissima, a penitential confraternity that met in a chapel below the Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala.¹⁰ One of the oldest, largest, and most powerful of the Sienese confraternities, the Compagnia di Santa Maria sotto le Volte was first recorded in the early thirteenth century as a society of noblemen. In 1363 it was conceded the right by the Sienese Republic to accept all charitable donations made to it, and shortly afterward, three less prominent confraternities were aggregated to it: the Disciplinati di Gesù Cristo, the Raccomandati di Gesù Crocifisso, and the Compagnia della Madonna dell’Ospedale dei Santi Gregorio e Niccolò del Sasso. By 1783, when Archduke Pietro Leopoldo imposed a special tax to stabilize the finances of the University of Siena, the Compagnia di Santa Maria sotto le Volte emerged as the wealthiest of all institutions in the city. Two years later, when Pietro Leopoldo issued the edict suppressing lay confraternities throughout Tuscany, the Compagnia was granted an exemption and converted to the Società di Esecutori di Pie Disposizioni, which remains operative to this day.¹¹

The high altar of the Compagnia’s chapel beneath the Spedale della Scala was dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul and was decorated in 1597 with an altarpiece by Alessandro Casolani featuring those two saints alongside the enthroned Virgin and Child, with Saints Catherine of Alexandria and Catherine of Siena in the background.¹² An earlier altarpiece triptych belonging to the Compagnia, painted by Niccolò di Ser Sozzo probably in the 1350s, also features Saints Peter and Paul in its lateral panels and Saint Catherine of Alexandria (with Saint Anthony Abbot) kneeling at the feet of the Virgin in the center panel. This triptych may be presumed to have served as the high altarpiece for the confraternal chapel until the altar was remodeled around 1590, the occasion for the commission to Casolani.¹³ It is also possible that Sano di Pietro’s altarpiece from which the present predella comes—if indeed it was painted for this confraternal chapel—may have supplanted the altarpiece by Niccolò di Ser Sozzo and may have been replaced, in turn, by that of Alessandro Casolani. A late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century manuscript history of the confraternity, however, states that, at that time, there were five altars in the chapel.¹⁴ It is unclear how many of these might have existed in the fifteenth century, and it is equally uncertain that Sano’s altarpiece stood in this chapel as opposed to one of the other benefices controlled by the confraternity, such as the Ospedale dei Santi Gregorio e Niccolò del Sasso, known as the Hospital of Monnagnese; the Ospedale di Uopini, which the confraternity inherited from Giovanni Colombini and the order of the Gesuati; or the Ospedale di Gesù Cristo in the Pian dei Mantellini. Of the surviving altarpieces by Sano di Pietro, the closest in style and size to the Yale predella is a triptych now in the Brooklyn Museum, representing the Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints James Major and John the Evangelist (fig. 5). This painting is to within one centimeter the same width as the Adoration of the Magi in the center of the Yale panel, but it is not certain whether the Brooklyn triptych is complete in its present form or whether it might once have included two or more additional lateral panels with further saints. It has also not yet been possible to connect any of the altars for which the confraternity was responsible with a dedication to Saints James and John.¹⁵ —LK

1. Donor portraits of members of a confraternity occur in precisely this form—kneeling on a pavement against a gilt and punched background—in two panels by Vecchietta now in the Musée Bonnat-Helleu in Bayonne and in the Musée Condé in Chantilly (inv. no. PE 8), both in France. These were correctly reconstructed by Luciano Bellosi (in Bellosi 1993a, 40–41) as the pilaster bases at either end of a predella with Franciscan scenes but misattributed by him to Francesco di Giorgio. They were probably painted less than a decade after the present predella at Yale. ↩︎

2. Ellen Frank and Charles Seymour, Jr., in Seymour et al. 1972, 47. ↩︎

3. Jarves 1860, 47, no. 43. ↩︎

4. Perkins 1905, 76. ↩︎

5. van Marle 1927b, 522. ↩︎

6. Gaillard 1923, 179–80, 204, pl. 27. ↩︎

7. Seymour 1970, 201–2, no. 152; and Frank and Seymour, in Seymour et al. 1972, 47. ↩︎

8. Seymour 1970, 201–2. ↩︎

9. Sirén 1916a, 158–59. ↩︎

10. The author is grateful to Pia Palladino for this identification. ↩︎

11. See Liberati 1939, 263–74; Manetti and Savino 1990, 122–92; and Catoni 2010, 9–16. ↩︎

12. Gallavotti Cavallero 1985, 382, 384, fig. 397. ↩︎

13. Gallavotti Cavallero 1985, 389–90, 394, figs. 405–7. ↩︎

14. Gallavotti Cavallero 1985, 406n32. ↩︎

15. Sano di Pietro is mentioned in a document of the Compagnia di Santa Maria sotto le Volte dated October 1, 1456; see Ceppari Ridolfi 2007, 177. On that occasion, however, he was representing the abbey of Santi Abondio e Abundanzio (Santa Bonda) in a property dispute with the Compagnia. Unlikely to be a useful terminus a quo for dating the Yale predella, this document may nevertheless be relevant to considerations of another major work by Sano di Pietro: the so-called Pala di Santa Bonda in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, inv. no. 226. For that work, see Pisani 2012, 165–85. On the other hand, one of the witnesses of this document, Cosimo di Carlo Piccolomini, was described in 1452 as the prior and rector of the confraternity; see Pisani 2012, 176. It is possible that his is one of the portraits included by Sano di Pietro in the pilaster bases of the Yale predella. ↩︎